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2010-09-25

Device Monitoring and Cooling

Over the last little while since I had built my own server machine I have needed software to make sure my hardware is running within the temperature ranges I want. Also I needed to find a cooling method that was easy and simplistic for myself.

Some tools I have found in order to test the functionality and performance of my hardware are listed below.

Temperature MonitoringHWMonitor: Keeps an eye on all of the temperatures of every device that supports temperature monitoring. No configuration required just download the installer and when you open the application it will show you all of the temperatures of your hardware.

SpeedFan: Is another monitoring device but in this case it is to check the RPM of your fans in your machine. Whether your machine is too loud or you just want to make sure a fan is spinning up or spinning at all this is a great tool.

Also, as a side note for those of you who are looking for a passive cooled system and wondering how the different passive cooling methods (heat sinks/tubes/fans etc.) work http://www.heatsink-guide.com/ is a great guide that describes the cooling methods in depth.

Stress TestingPrime95: Is a CPU stress testing application that calculates prime numbers and stresses 1 to many threads/cores of your CPU to make sure you are not overheating on full load or to help in testing the stability of overclocking of your processor.

Cinebench: Is an extremely intensive award-winning performance tester that will test your processor and graphics card. It is a great way to stress test your GPU and one of the best I have seen

CrystalDiskMark: One of the best and only HDD benchmark testers I have seen that is freely available. It will allow you to test read and write speeds of various types (sequential, random etc) as well as different block size performance on your drive.